Rahul Bhole

Chor Bani Thangaat Kare released on 21 July 2017, directed by Bhole and written by him with Chetan Dhanani, Mehul Vyas and Vinit Kanojia, produced by Arpan Pandya and Harsh Parmar under Reelium Films. Amit Mistry plays Rajkumar Trivedi, disowned as a boy for compulsive stealing, who learns in adulthood that the condition has a name and that the only cure anyone offers him is to fall in love. He tries to give back everything he has taken and walks into a mess of terrorists, politicians, police and godmen.

Sachin and Jigar wrote the songs, Niren Bhatt wrote the lyrics, and it was shot mostly in Ahmedabad. Shruti Jambhekar in The Times of India gave it four stars and singled out the casting. As debuts go it is an unusually structured one: a comedy of errors is the hardest comic form to write because every laugh has to be paid for by a plot mechanism that was set up forty minutes earlier.

Dhruv Bhatt published Tatvamasi in 1998 and it is not obvious material for a film. It is thick with philosophy, it has a large cast of characters and its subject is a river. Bhole and Kanojia wrote the screenplay themselves, said the character count and the philosophy were the hard parts, and got the author's permission to change what they had to. Reva released on 6 April 2018 with Chetan Dhanani as Karan, a rich American who has to persuade an ashram on the Narmada to sign a no objection certificate before he can inherit his grandfather's estate.

They shot at fifteen locations across Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, most of them on the banks of the Narmada, at Bhedaghat, Gaurighat, Maheshwar Ghat and Mangrol, with sequences in the Polo Forest and the Naida Caves on Diu. It grossed a little over Rs 3 crore, which is a small number, and it won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Gujarati at the 66th ceremony, at the same event where Hellaro took the top national prize. The commercial number is the wrong measure. The achievement is that a canonical Gujarati novel was made filmable at all.

Vickida No Varghodo arrived on 8 July 2022 with Malhar Thakar, Monal Gajjar, Manasi Rachh and Jinal Belani, a farce about a man whose past turns up in the middle of his present. The trailer took five million views in a day, Sonu Nigam sang Udi Re, the film ran beyond fifty days and reported a gross above Rs 15 crore. That is roughly five Revas.

All the Best Pandya followed on 14 March 2025, announced only five weeks before release, with Malhar Thakar defending his father Darshan Jariwala in court against a bribery charge, alongside Vandana Pathak and Yukti Randeria. A trade analyst in Surat told Bollywood Hungama that a cinema there dropped two night shows of Sikandar to make room for it and for Umbarro. That is the clearest measure of local pull there is: a Gujarati film taking screens off a Salman Khan release in its own state.

On All the Best Pandya, Bhole and Kanojia are credited as directors and as editors. That combination is rare anywhere and, in Gujarati cinema, it is close to unheard of. A script is written three times, on the page, on the floor and in the cut, and most films lose their argument somewhere in the third one because a different person is holding the scissors. Here nobody hands the film over.

The other detail worth keeping is what he calls himself. His own account puts writer first, then science columnist, then filmmaker. A weekly science column is a strange thing for a director to keep doing once he has a National Award on the shelf, and it is the most honest clue to how his films are built. All four of them explain something complicated to a stranger without slowing down, whether it is kleptomania, the philosophy of a river, or a bribery charge nobody in the family understands.